Movie Reviews and Previews Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence in 'Don’t Look Up' Don’t Look Up, directed by Adam McKay and written by McKay from a story he developed with David Sirota, wants to be Network but for climate change. Roughly two-thirds of the way into the film, Dr. Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio, whose performance is one of the only redeemable things By Sarah • Dec 20, 2021 03:48 pm
Movie Reviews and Previews Cooper Hoffman and Alana Haim in Licorice Pizza Paul Thomas Anderson returns to the greater Los Angeles milieu of the 1970s, but instead of a despairing tale about the failure of the American Dream, he’s here with a sweet, mostly gentle coming of age dramedy loosely inspired by his own adolescence in the Valley. As someone who By Sarah • Dec 20, 2021 01:47 pm
Movie Reviews and Previews Review: Olivia Colman in The Lost Daughter Maggie Gyllenhaal makes her feature directorial debut with The Lost Daughter, an adaptation, also by Gyllenhaal, of Elena Ferrante’s novella. Gyllenhaal is astoundingly assured, as both a director and a screenwriter, interweaving past and present into a crushing tale of motherhood and personhood that are not always in agreement. By Sarah • Dec 17, 2021 03:46 pm
Movie Reviews and Previews Review: Hell is other people in Nightmare Alley Following the fish f-cking of The Shape of Water, Guillermo Del Toro returns the slightly more normal world of monstrous humanity, where there are no fish-men or haunted houses or magical labyrinths, only the hell of other people. Directed by Del Toro, and adapted by Del Toro and Kim Morgan By Sarah • Dec 17, 2021 01:58 pm
Movie Reviews and Previews A Movie with MOVIE STARS! How many of us are there out there? How big is our club? The club is People Who Love Rom-Coms and Will Pay To See Them in Theatres. Are we old? There’s been a lament in the movie industry over the last decade or so – and especially now since By Lainey • Dec 17, 2021 11:38 am
Movie Reviews and Previews Spider-Man: No Way Home brings Peter Parker full circle Mild spoilers, nothing big but a little more context than the trailers. Marvel movies typically go one of two ways: they start out great but fall apart in the third act, or they start slow but end strong. Spider-Man: No Way Home, directed by Jon Watts, falls into the second By Sarah • Dec 16, 2021 01:45 pm
Top Reads Aline will haunt us forever Moonfall is already the dumbest movie of 2022, but you know what the most INSANE movie of 2022 will be? Aline. There is no doubt in my mind that NOTHING will top Aline for sheer, jaw-dropping scope of absurdity. Aline, an official selection of the Cannes Film Festival, is written By Sarah • Dec 16, 2021 11:17 am
Movie Reviews and Previews The Critics’ Choice nominations: As expected, no Green Knight The Critics’ Choice Association just announced their film nominations, on the heels of the HFPA announcing the Golden Globes nominations earlier this morning. Full disclosure, I am a member of the CCA, so I get to nominate films, and while I didn’t expect all my nominations to line up By Sarah • Dec 13, 2021 02:21 pm
Movie Reviews and Previews Simon Rex (yes, that’s right) in Red Rocket Erstwhile MTV VJ and 2000s It Boy actor Simon Rex makes a, frankly, shocking comeback in Sean Baker’s latest slice of life realist drama, Red Rocket. Starring as Mikey, a washed-up porn star, Rex (who has his own history with the adult entertainment industry) gives the kind of livewire By Sarah • Dec 10, 2021 03:43 pm
Movie Reviews and Previews Dev Patel’s Chippendales movie is growing True crime is a vast genre, and every aficionado has their preferred corners of the true crime library. Mine is “cocaine-fueled mayhem of the Seventies and Eighties”, so the story of the Chippendales murder-for-hire plot is an old, well not favorite, because people died, but a much-revisited tale of excess By Sarah • Dec 10, 2021 12:35 pm
Movie Reviews and Previews Fine, yes, I like West Side Story Steven Spielberg’s remake of West Side Story, originally adapted to film in 1961 and now reimagined by Spielberg and Tony Kushner, is about as good as movie musicals get. It’s big, it’s melodramatic, the songs, penned by Steven Sondheim, fill the room with emotion, and Leonard Bernstein’ By Sarah • Dec 10, 2021 11:35 am
Movie Reviews and Previews Olivia Wilde can’t turn down a dare Olivia Wilde covers the January 2022 issue of Vogue, which surprised me because it seems like this is in service of the next project she’s promoting, her sophomore directorial effort, Don’t Worry Darling, as she appears in several of the photos alongside cinematographer Matthew Libatique – and the film By Lainey • Dec 10, 2021 11:00 am
Movie Reviews and Previews At last, Halo A long time ago, in what feels by now like a previous life, I saw a movie adaptation of the popular Halo video game series implode in spectacular Hollywood fashion. It was a lesson in crash-and-burn Hollywood dealmaking, and I honestly thought Halo would never get made. The video game By Sarah • Dec 10, 2021 10:18 am
Top Reads Denzel and MBJ: Two Sexiest Men Alive on a Red Carpet Denzel Washington and Michael B Jordan were in New York last night for the premiere of A Journal for Jordan, which opens on Christmas Day. Denzel directs, MBJ stars, it’s a blockbuster combination of two artists who for years have been culturally connected as king and successor and who By Lainey • Dec 10, 2021 09:44 am
Movie Reviews and Previews Intro for December 10, 2021 Dear Gossips, All year, Lainey has been exhorting us to enjoy Bennifer 2.0, to be glad of Bennifer 2.0, to recognize Bennifer 2.0 as the great gift from the gossip gods that it—they—are. But let us also recognize that the gossip gods have given a By Sarah • Dec 10, 2021 09:11 am
Movie Reviews and Previews Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem in Being the Ricardos Being the Ricardos, written and directed by Aaron Sorkin, takes three things that happened in the lives of legendary entertainers Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz and compacts them into one fictitious week. While producing an episode of their hit show I Love Lucy, Walter Winchell outs Lucy (Nicole Kidman) as By Sarah • Dec 09, 2021 02:07 pm
